The Naked City Blog

Exploring life in the city – Charlotte – and the greater metro region. Looking at urban design, transportation, growth, the built environment and more.

Mary Newsom is a lifelong journalist and observer of city life in the Charlotte region and beyond, with a focus on urban design, sustainable development, growth and city planning. She is associate director of urban and regional affairs at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. Her blog reflects her views only, not necessarily those of the institute or of UNC Charlotte.
Contact: mnewsom@uncc.edu.

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016

Trees, grass, drought and the future

Can lush lawns be sustained with future droughts and water supply issues looming? Photo: Mary Newsom

Water and our supply of it is
on my mind this week, as a smoky haze drifts around Charlotte, reminding us of
the wildfires in the tinder-dry N.C. foothills and mountains west of the city. It’s been abnormally
hot and dry for months in the
Appalachians and the Southeastern U.S. Two Western North Carolina counties are now
in exceptional drought and seven others in "extreme drought."

The city's water-sewer
utility, Charlotte Water, has a keen interest in encouraging people to conserve
water, and not just in a drought, although they tend to concentrate the mind,
so to speak.

Taking the long view,
Charlotte Water officials see that relentlessly sucking more water from the
local reservoirs – Mountain Island Lake and Lake Norman – is not a strategy
that can sustain the area's growing millions of residents in future decades. Further,
towns and cities downstream of Charlotte use the same river (dammed decades ago
into a series of lakes by what's now Duke Energy ) for their water supplies, so
draining it is not an acceptable option.

So Charlotte Water officials
are eyeing the area’s beloved lawns as a way to reduce water use. On an average
day, the utility pumps 100 million gallons of treated water each day, says
Jennifer Frost, public affairs manager at Charlotte Water. But during the summer that’s been from 130 to 135 million
gallons a day – due to people irrigating lawns. “I think we hit 143 one day in
August,” she said recently.

But Frost notes that
suggesting people reduce the size of their lawns in favor of more
drought-tolerant plantings hasn’t, in the past, been a winning message. So she
hopes the utility can, instead, join with local efforts to encourage more tree planting and better care for
existing trees.

“Inherent to growing a canopy
is that reduction in turf grass,” Frost says. And, she says, “We will not get
to the next level of water conservation without reducing the level of
irrigation that we use.”

For the record, here are the
requested water restrictions for Charlotte, for now:

Irrigate only on Tuesdays and
Saturdays between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m.

Limit landscape watering to 1
inch of water per week, including rain.

Conserve water indoors and
outdoors.

Refrain from outdoor water
use during the day (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.) to reduce evaporation losses.

Don't fill swimming pools,
and top off full pools only on Thursdays and Sundays, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.